head to head · open source
Sentry vs karma
Sentry has 45,704 GitHub stars, 4,959 forks, 2,265 open issues and last shipped yesterday. karma has 2,692 stars, 206 forks, 39 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Sentry leads on adoption by 1,598% (45,704 vs 2,692 stars). Sentry is written in Python under a custom or non-standard licence; karma is written in TypeScript under Apache-2.0. Sentry has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, karma 8%. Sentry was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (monitoring), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Sentry | karma | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 46K | ★ 2.7K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-04 | 2026-11-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 5.0K | ⑂ 206 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Sentry if
- You weight community size — 46K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick karma if
- You want the karma feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and karma fits your workflow better
About Sentry
Users and logs provide clues. Sentry provides answers. What's Sentry? Sentry is the debugging platform that helps every developer detect, trace, and fix issues. Code breaks, fix it faster. Official Sentry SDKs JavaScript Electron React Native Python Ruby PHP Laravel Go Rust Java/Kotlin Objective C/Swift C\ /F\ C/C++ Dart/Flutter Perl Clojure Elixir Unity Unreal Engine Godot Engine PowerShell Resources Documentation Discussions (Bugs, feature requests, general questions) Discord Contributing Bug Tracker Code Transifex (Translate Sentry\!)
read the full Sentry overview →
About karma
karma Alert dashboard for Prometheus Alertmanager. Alertmanager =0.22.0 is required. See GitHub Releases for release changelog. Feature overview Alertmanager UI is useful for browsing alerts and managing silences, but it's lacking as a dashboard tool karma aims to fill this gap. Alert aggregation and deduplication Starting with the 0.7.0 release it can aggregate alerts from multiple Alertmanager instances, running either in HA mode or separate. Unique alerts are displayed by filtering duplicates. Each alert is tagged with the names of all Alertmanager instances it was found at and can be filtered based on those…
read the full karma overview →
More in Infrastructure & Operations
Related comparisons
More Monitoring & Observability projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Monitoring & Observability field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Sentry or karma more popular?
Sentry has 45,704 GitHub stars and karma has 2,692. Sentry has the larger community by that measure.
Are Sentry and karma free?
Both are open source. Sentry has no licence declared in this registry, and karma is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Sentry and karma?
Sentry is written in Python and karma in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Sentry or karma?
Choose Sentry if you want the larger community (45,704 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose karma if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.